It is notoriously challenging to identify memory corruption bugs and even more challenging to identify the root cause of those bugs. For example, use-after-free memory corruption bugs result from a pointer to memory being used after the memory has been freed (i.e., deleted). Although the use-after-free bug may sometimes cause the computing device to crash, the computing device will oftentimes continue to execute. As such, it is quite difficult, if not impossible, for a programmer to detect the existence of some use-after-free bugs using common software techniques (e.g., unit or integration testing).
Some debugging systems permit programmers to catch the use of the deleted memory resulting in the observance of a use-after-free bug. However, the identification of the root cause of the use-after-free bug in such systems is significantly limited or entirely absent. As such, the root cause typically remains, which may introduce inconsistent behavior and/or security vulnerabilities to the computing device.